Books this year: a book diary

The Wealth of Networks is an academic description of the technological and cultural transformations that occurred with the rise of the internet, and the reactions against them on the part of institutions who derive their power from a 20th century model of cultural production. The book centers around the realm of intellectual property, because that’s where most of the battles over cultural production are currently being fought.

In the old days, no one thought of ideas as property. Shakespeare took the story translated by Arthur Brooke just like Virgil remixed dozens of preexisting books, and nobody sued, nobody cried foul. For the past 10,000 years of civilization, no one seemed to think that thoughts belonged to their originators. Then, with the advent of 20th century communication technologies,  something interesting happened. The technologies presented an opportunity to cheaply reach an unprecedented audience with music, videos, and other social artifacts, but expenses were such that artists couldn’t but their own studios and radio towers. The market’s solution to this problem was for social artifacts to be treated as transferable property, which could be given to large companies, which in turn sold them to consumers. Our current system of celebrity ensued, and pop culture overtook folk cultures as never before in the modern world.

Then, in a fantastic turn of events, the microcomputer and the internet came along, and the methods of producing and disseminating social artifacts became ridiculously cheap. Freed from the obligation to make money to pay off expensive transmitting technologies, people start to produce free tools for production, which drove down the cost of producing artifacts even more. The invisible hand starts to favor this weird post-capitalist, neo-folk culture, but the old Powers That Be don’t take it lying down.  They use their old media to supress the new, and they get laws passed to further criminalize the old practice of spreading thoughts freely. They try to outlaw the modern computer by mandating the installation of chips that will only run government-approved software. They invent technologies which will enable service providers to block parts of the internet that lead you to free alternatives.

Benkler (the author), suggests that the government ought to take over or regulate the internet, so culture can be free. You can probably guess my thoughts on this. Benkler also alleges that there is no magic force behind history that will ensure the victory of free culture over the entrenched 20th century media machine. Here, again, I disagree, kind of.

Benkler also spends a little time talking about the way we’re taking our culture and politics into our own hands, and it makes me wish he’d held off to see things like reddit and the Ron Paul Revolution before writing the book.

The book is amazing, and if you’ll let me, I’ll converse with you about it at length. The lasting impressions that it has made on me are these: that there is no such thing as thought crime, that I should pirate to my heart’s content, that I should uninstall Windows, and that I should throw my TV off of a cliff.

I got this tiny collection of Orwell essays at the same time as Chris did. I thought there was a conspiracy for a long time.

I love Orwell. I love people in history (so few!) who believe in something. I like Utopians, and I have a weird thing for Esperantists and religious fanatics and hippie communes. And even though Orwell is best known for the books he wrote when he was coming down from his Utopian high, he’s something of a true believer, even in those.

The biggest essay in this book, The Lion and the Unicorn, was written as bombs were falling on England and Britons were beginning to contemplate the possibility that they might soon be citizens of the Reich. Orwell takes this opportunity to pontificate like some old testament patriarch about how England is doomed unless they come to repent and turn towards socialism. He explains that the socialist elements of the Nazi war machine make it superior to mere capitalist states like England, and that England will be defeated unless it makes amends within a matter of months. If I remember right, neither happened.

Another essay was about Orwell’s motivations for writing. Not really anything to note here, except a tiny tangent about how some people kick ass and make it as big, selfish, fun-having, self-actualized people while the mass of men became cogs in some machine or another and their souls suffocate and die. I don’t know if it’s true, but it might be, and it’s horrible.

The last and best thing in the booklet is a diatribe against pretentious writing that would do Sokal and B.R. Myers proud. Unlike Sokal and B.R. Myers, though, it has me agonizing over everything I write - even this. Most striking is that the kind of writing that Orwell criticizes for existing in his day has become the norm in ours, to the extent that nowadays it’d probably be impossible to get something clearly written published in an academic journal for the very reason that it’s clear. All of this (and Dr. Paul too) is great to read when you make your money writing unclearly for government contracts.

This book, Dr. Paul’s latest, was written like a normal book instead of being compiled from speeches to congress. It’s a really small, really easy to read, really well argued libertarian manifesto. If I had the money, I’d buy a million of these and leave them around like Gideon bibles.

One of the fun, refreshing things in this book is that Paul says that he’d be for liberty even if it drove the economy into the ground. (It wouldn’t. We’d all be rich like Switzerland.) Paul’s the rare libertarian-for-metaphysical-reasons, and it makes him easier to stomach than the barrel of nerds that is the Libertarian Party.

There’s not much else I can say. I already went on forever about the last book.

I am mildly embarrassed to have read this book. I felt like I was neglecting librivox, so I looked at the “recently uploaded” section, and found this book from 1902 about how the force of will and character creates our lives - a pretty good, Emersonian sounding thing - and I thought, “hey, I need some inspiration”, so I downloaded it. It was alright. Kind of. The thesis of the book is this: What you think and believe changes how you act, and how you act changes your circumstances, and your circumstances make you happy or sad, SO (shock of shocks!) THE WAY YOU THINK AFFECTS YOUR LIFE!

Furthermore, if you have a shitty life, it might be the case that some of it’s your fault, and if you have no passion or goals, you’ll have nothing to live for, and you’ll just drift about. It’s sad to think that anyone could learn anything from this book.

Allen writes chapters by thinking of a sentence and then rephrasing it in 100 different ways and repeating it over and over. When he runs out of recasts, he picks a new sentence and starts a new chapter. As with modern art, I’m half offended and half envious. It’s ridiculous that someone could make money like this, but if it’s that easy, I definitely want in.

Also, as a historical curiosity, Allen’s “the way you think changes your life” thesis got misunderstood and turned into all kinds of modern foolishness, like The Secret. He is considered to have greatly influenced the “New Thought Movement“, which I think is almost too creepily like the Christian prophetic movement that Bp. Adler was influenced by, the “Word of Faith” movement, not to have influenced it.

The Age of Faith is the fourth book in Durant’s ridiculous eleven-volume Story of Civilization series, which Levi and I have foolishly committed to finish in our lives. Because it’s a particularly large book (the largest in the series, and probably bigger than anything else I’ll read in my life), and because graduate school interfered, it took me about two years.

I came to The Age of Faith at a point in my life where I expected to find the answers to all of life’s questions in its utopian chronicles. I began the book, desperate to believe something, in the last throws of the CEC, and as many of the people I knew were becoming atheists. I had also just read Ideas Have Consequences, The Abolition of Man, The Well Trained Mind, and The Inklings. I was (and still am) convinced that the maladies of our age have resulted from our deviations from the transendental truths that were best appreciated in the Dark Ages, when everything but character sucked.

The book is gargantuan and deep, and resists trite synopsis, but it’s biggest impressions on me were:

1. Wow the Vikings are cool.
2. Wow the Sufis are cool.
3. My God, I hate every atheist pope and caliph, I hate every king and lord, I hate all of you degenerate, Nietzschean bastards who use religions you don’t believe to oppress other people, and I have to tell you, We’re coming. We, the protestants, the rabble, the French Revolution, We, the lowly and believing, and We will see your head on a pike.
4. Wow St. Francis is cool.

My final analysis: the middle ages were the bad for everything but morals for the common man, and the riddle of history may just be: can we make man enfranchised, educated, and prosperous without making him suck like the evil popes?

This book was given to me for Christmas by my favoritest sister-in-law ever, Amy Coelho.

It’s a South African novel about a Zulu Anglican parson who lives in a small agricultural community that’s population is diminishing due to poor soil conditions and opportunities in Johannesburg. Eerily, when people go off to J-burg, they universally stop writing and drop off the face of the earth. One day, Zulu pastor man (”Kumalo”) gets a letter saying his sister, who disappeared to Johannesburg, is gravely ill. He comes to find out that really she’s just in grave sin. She’s an alcoholic prostitute. The city has decivilized her - eaten her soul  (my words, not the author’s)- and that’s why she stopped writing. He comes to find that his brother has abandoned the faith and become a corrupt politician, and his son has done far, far, worse.

The whole book is BEAUTIFULLY and very Africanly written. It makes me want to go to South Africa. I also love the theme of city as all-destroyer, and the parallel theme as city -as - something - that - you - can’t - deny - is - cool. The book ends with the answering of some of Kumalo’s prayers: some guy gets sent in to teach the village how to farm so the soil will get better and the land will again be able to support people, and Kumalo lays plans to resurrect the village and try to bring some of the diaspora back.

This is the best book I’ve read since Ideas Have Consequences. It’s an assortment of Dr. Paul’s speeches and journal entries about foreign policy from 1976 to the present, and it’s impossible for me to read anything from it without thinking of Star Wars Episode II, where an evil cabal orchestrates both sides of a war in order to convince the republic to abdicate power to a dictator. I can easily imagine Paul there, or in the final days of the Roman Republic, heaping eloquent truth on deaf ears while apocalypse brews.

This ridiculously eye-opening book taught me a lot about what every congressman knows but no news network will tell you. America has fought on both sides of every conflict since World War II. We’ve given military and financial assistance to both Israel and the PLO. We arm India and Pakistan. We funneled money to our enemies in North Vietnam by subsidizing Russia. We then propped up communist regimes with our aid in places like Poland, helping them resist the revolutionary Worker’s Strike, while at the same time calling for democracy.

Our policy seems crafted to sustain permanent conflict, and when things settle down of their own accord, like clockwork, we instigate a major war by making erroneous charges and inconsistent demands against a weaker country, and then invading. Things become so predictable that Dr. Paul starts to forecast them with great accuracy. He sees the Iraq war coming 15 years in advance. Then, in 1999 he forecasts:

“When a foreign war comes to our shores in the form of terrorism, we can be sure that our government will explain the need for further sacrifice of personal liberties to win this war”.

Near the end of the book he hypothesizes that a Gulf of Tonkin-style incident will be used as a pretext for initiating a war with Iran.

Every incident which threatens our national security is met with emergency measures which limit our freedoms, and these invariably become permanent. Meanwhile, congress abdicates more and more power to the executive branch and to the United Nations. All recent wars have been unconstitutional quasi-wars, carried out by the executive branch after congress unlawfully grants it discretionary authority to do battle. Lately, when making these authorizations for the executive branch, congress cites the necessity of enforcing U.N. resolutions, making a precedent for the international dictation of our affairs.

Near the end of the book, Paul seems to give up hope. He stops describing the republic as moribund and starts calling it dead. By historical analogy, he deduces that our nation will likely become very oppresive and bankrupt.

I just hope I have my solar panels up by then.